1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to apparatus for collecting, crushing, sorting as to color and storing crushed glass bottles for recycling, and for dispensing tokens or the like in exchange for the collected bottles.
2. Description of the Prior Art
With increasing emphasis in recent years on energy conservation and environmental preservation, the collection and recycling of empty glass bottles has become an important factor in the conservation and preservation effort. The recycling of glass bottles has helped to reduce the presence of broken glass bottles strewn throughout the environment and lessen energy consumption by recycling empty glass bottles for future use. Numerous states and localities have adopted glass conservation programs that require the recycling of glass bottles.
Unfortunately, the lack of an efficient and economical system to recover and reuse glass bottles has largely caused a tremendous waste of recoverable bottles, since currently it is often easier and more economical, in the short term, to discard the bottles, instead of recycling them. Additionally, the recycling of bottles poses numerous problems in ascertaining whether a particular bottle is refundable; sorting refundable bottles by brand and color; and determining the value of the refund to be given by the store to the customer. Often, stores must either hire extra employees for these particular time consuming tasks or allow customers to return the bottles on an honor system, in which the customer is trusted to report the correct amount of the bottles he has returned.
Some machines have been developed for encouraging the recovery and recycling of glass bottle containers. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,248,389 to Thompson et al discloses an apparatus for sorting and handling diverse types of containers by using an optical scanner to read a code on the container. However, this machine does not preselect the containers prior to acceptance by the machine to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable containers. Similarly, it does not sort the bottles by the color of the glass. Consequently, a customer who inserts a non-refundable bottle into the apparatus must wait while the machine conveys the bottle to the optical reader, which determines the identity of the bottle. The resulting crushed glass from the break up of the accepted bottles is a mixture of colors due to the lack of color separation by the machine of the diverse bottle colors. Accordingly, the crushed glass must either be painstakingly separated by color prior to use, or melted down as a color mixture, which mixture may have less economic value per unit weight than color separated glass.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,573,641 to DeWoolfson et al, a glass bottle collection and crushing apparatus is disclosed which preselects only those bottles that are refundable prior to accepting the offered bottle into the machine. Unacceptable and nonrefundable bottles are recognized by the apparatus and not processed further. Once accepted, the refundable bottle is separated by color and crushed for easy storage, and eliminates the need of having a store or retailer use employees to identify and sort the refundable bottles, and give refunds to the customers. Rather, the customer, unaided, can return and receive a refund for his bottles. The refunded bottles are separated by color, crushed, and stored by the apparatus to make it easy for the glass of the bottles to be recovered for recycling. By crushing the returned bottles, the space requirements that the store must allocate for handling the returned bottles is lessened and, thereby, allows the store to use this valuable space for other more economical uses.
To achieve the foregoing advantages, the apparatus in U.S. Pat. No. 4,573,641 is used for collecting and storing refundable empty glass bottles of two or more individual colors and for issuing predetermined return deposits for the containers collected. Each refundable bottle has a code imprinted thereon. Preselection means are provided for determining the brand, color and refundability of a preferred empty glass bottle, the preselection means including a laser scanner for reading the imprinted code on each glass bottle, a bottle access area configured to accommodate bottles for exposure to the laser scanner, and a microprocessor capable of receiving and interpreting the read code from the laser scanner, means for accepting only a bottle identified by the preselection means as being refundable, the accepting means sorting the refundable bottles into either of two colors, means responsive to the accepting means for crushing the refundable bottles into glass cullet, the crushing means including one or more rotating crushing wheels, coin or token dispensing means responsive to the preselection means for dispensing coins in return for the refundable bottles, and means for storing the glass cullet received from the crushing means.
The accepting means further includes means to allow a bottle to fall inwardly to the crushing means. Depending upon the color of the bottle, the preselection means activates a proper solenoid and latch mechanisms to cause a panel to tilt inwardly, thereby allowing the bottle to fall by gravity into the crushing means. The crushing means includes one or more rotating crushing wheels positioned beneath each panel to receive the refundable bottles deposited by the accepting means and to crush the received bottles into glass cullet. A storage means can include a collection hopper positioned beneath the crushing wheels so that the crushed glass falls by gravity into the hoppers.
However, because the sorting occurs before the bottle is crushed, a separate crushing means and chambers must be provided in the apparatus for each color sorted bottle, duplicating a portion of the apparatus and its drive means, substantially increasing the cost of the machine. Rather, if the sorting of the glass as to color occurs after crushing of the bottles, substantial savings in equipment cost is realized, with little chance of color contamination of the glass.